Anthropic has decided against acquiring the Israeli AI startup Decart, Bloomberg reported on September 8. The deal was said to be worth roughly 6 billion USD (about 920 billion yen), which would have made it the largest acquisition in the company's history. Anthropic stepped back after completing its review of the target, and the two sides are said to have left room for cooperation in some other form.

Talks surfaced in August and collapsed after diligence

According to the report, Anthropic examined the deal seriously and completed due diligence, the process of scrutinizing a target's finances and technology before a purchase, before ultimately pulling out. People familiar with the matter said the two companies may still find other ways to work together. Both Anthropic and Decart declined to comment.

The talks first came to light in August. Even then the figure was put at roughly 6 billion USD, with the caveat that nothing was settled and the negotiations could fall apart. In the end, it was the caveat that came true.

Exchange rate: 1 USD = 154 JPY (as of September 9, 2026)

The target was chip efficiency, not world models

Decart is known publicly for its work on world models. The part that drew Anthropic's interest, however, was somewhere else: optimization technology that pulls more work out of the same silicon across both training and inference. The company's own website promises to squeeze every ounce of performance from every chip.

For Anthropic the logic is straightforward. If existing compute can absorb more demand, that is not an entry into a new product category but a reduction in the cost of serving customers. That single point is what marks this out as a deal about unit economics rather than product strategy.

A 50 percent markup in four months

Decart was founded in 2023 by brothers Dean and Orian Leitersdorf together with Moshe Shalev. In May the company raised 300 million USD (about 46 billion yen) in a round led by Radical Ventures, joined by NVIDIA, Adobe Ventures, Valor Equity Partners and Atreides Management, alongside existing backers Sequoia Capital, Benchmark and Zeev Ventures. The Wall Street Journal put the valuation at close to 4 billion USD (about 620 billion yen), up from 3.1 billion USD (about 480 billion yen) the previous August.

A 6 billion USD purchase would therefore have been roughly a 50 percent markup four months later. That is not a small revision over such a short period.

The other business: virtual try-on and live streaming

Decart's other line of work is world models, systems trained on text and millions of hours of video so that they internalize how physical objects behave. Applications range from autonomous driving to online retail.

Its Lucy model takes live video of a person and generates high-resolution footage of them wearing clothes they are not actually wearing. It goes directly at the virtual try-on problem that fashion e-commerce has failed to solve for a decade. eBay is both an investor and a customer. Chief executive Dean Leitersdorf said at a conference in Paris in July that the technology is also used for live streaming on Twitch, TikTok and YouTube. Holding a chip-efficiency layer and a world-model business inside one company is what makes Decart unusual.

Reading it against the IPO preparations

Anthropic has rarely made large acquisitions. Its biggest to date was 400 million USD (about 62 billion yen) for a team of fewer than ten people. Six billion is 15 times that.

The company is also spending heavily on compute while preparing to go public. People close to the preparations told Bloomberg that it is targeting a listing on a scale that could match or exceed SpaceX's record offering. Wanting technology that stretches existing infrastructure further is a reasonable instinct from that position.

Paying a substantial premium weeks before a listing, on the other hand, is harder to explain to incoming shareholders. An acquisition might have made the cost base look better, but it would have worked against a record of disciplined dealmaking. Whether price or something surfaced in diligence ended the talks is not established by the reporting so far.

Summary

Anthropic considered buying Decart at around 6 billion USD and walked away after due diligence. The prize was not world models but optimization technology that raises the efficiency of the chips underneath. The detail worth watching is that the two sides are said to have kept a path to cooperation open. Licensing the technology rather than owning it would reach the same goal for less, and would need no lengthy explanation in a prospectus. The further the IPO preparations go, the more plausible that route looks.